The Archival Turn: Poetry and Posterity in Late Medieval England and France

This dissertation argues that changes in late medieval archives prompted literary authors to write with an eye toward the future. Archives across England and France became increasingly well organized over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as medieval record keepers moved legal documents, chronicles, and poetry from cupboards and chests into library rooms. Catalogues proliferated, and archival duties became increasingly codified. As a result, writers of French, English, and Latin literature began to think like archivists: ordering their poems with a fervor, collecting stories and complete works, and dreaming of future readers. Poets like John Gower fantasized about shaping their legacies under the archive’s auspices, where their books would “duelle” (dwell) in collections into the future. Yet medieval archives also provoked anxiety about the fragility of cultural memory among writers like Guillaume de Machaut, who worried that disorganized historical records would impact plague historiography for the long term. The works of these authors invite us to reconsider transhistoricism as a two-way endeavor: though today we may think back on medieval literature, centuries ago, medieval authors thought forward to us too.